I had the weirdest haircut I have ever had yesterday, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Just to clarify, it’s not the haircut itself that was weird. I look very much the same as I usually do following a haircut – as if my head has been placed in a pencil sharpener.

Technically it was the same haircut I have had for the past 20 or so years, ever since I realised that my bouffant look was making me appear as if I were auditioning for a touring Doctor Who stageshow in 1985. It was a Number Four, back and sides, and a trim on top. 

I can never remember if I want a tapered or square neck, so I just say yes to the first option given to me by whichever barber is doing the honours. I never really care, as I can’t see the back of my head. I don’t even think about the back of my head. I know it’s there, and I’m glad of that fact because I don’t want my brains to fall out if I’m startled or I take a sharp corner, but otherwise there’s not much I can do about it.

Anyway, what my haircut is not is a faff. Including chat from my usual barber, I usually go from the awkward unclarity of knowing if I’m allowed to sit down yet to ineffectually using the tissue provided to brush off the various clippings adhering to my face in an average time of six minutes.

Yesterday’s haircut took 47 minutes.

As usual, it was my own fault for trying something new. Last time I tried something new in the haircutting milieu, I had hot waxed cotton buds shoved into my nose and ears and their hairs ripped out, and my unusually sensitive scalp was assaulted with a spray that provoked such a dermatological reaction that one of my colleagues thought I’d been in a fist fight.

But I’m a busy man, with important things to do, and, when I saw that my usual barber was a man down, with six people waiting for their hair to be cut, I walked right past and on to my old barber’s shop. He had retired, and, sadly, recently died, but I knew he wouldn’t have sold his business to the sort of weirdo who would take 47 minutes to cut my hair.

I entered the shop and the barber motioned for me to sit down. Textbook. Then he covered me with the apron. It was really tight around the neck, uncomfortably so, but I decided to tough it out for six minutes. It was also really warm. Again, I could tough it out for six minutes.

He asked me what I wanted. I gave him the usual specs, and he set to work. After a fashion. He started with the clippers on my ears. Not around my ears, on my ears. Not, I would contend, even at my age, a priority area.

After my ears were shorn, he turned his attention to my back and sides, taking several passes over what I had previously assumed was a fairly normal-sized head, shaving maybe a quarter of a millimetre off each time. A couple of police cars drove past, and he launched into what I can only describe as a five-minute improv bit about how I were a master criminal, and that the police were probably after me. I tried my best to enter into the spirit of the impromptu play, but my heart wasn’t really in it. I could feel my body baking under the apron like a salt-crust fish, and I was regretting the colour of my T-shirt. How, I wondered, did my hair look exactly the same as it did when I sat in that seat?

“Look at this!” he told his young apprentice, a woman in her late teens/early 20s, who was scrolling on her phone and wishing away her life. “Have you seen the back of his head?”

“What?! What’s happened?!” I asked.

“Nothing, nothing, it’s just… I’ve never seen one like it.”

“What?!” Why was he making me have to think about the back of my head? That’s not why I visit the barber.

“It’s just. Well, 95% of white men’s heads are flat at the back. But yours… Yours is curved. It’s magnificent.”

“Oh,” I said. I don’t think anybody could have put it better. “I don’t usually see the back of my head.”

“You must!” he said. He grabbed a mirror and held it behind my head. I looked at the mirror. It was the back of my head.

“Look!” he implored his young apprentice, tearing her away from TikTok or whatever. “If you gave this white man a Number Two at the back, it would look like a Number Four. Just incredible.”

“Please tell me you’re not giving me a Number Two,” I begged.

“No, no,” he said. “But if I had, it would be all right.”

“I have to emphasise,” I replied, “that it really wouldn’t.”

I glanced at the clock. Somehow this process had been going on for 25 minutes. It was feeling less like a haircut and more like an abduction. 

He resumed cutting my hair, now reaching the top, with the tiniest, most delicate scissors I have ever seen. They were the sort of scissors that Tinkerbell would have owned. Again, he took atoms of hair from my head with each pass. It was like having a Reiki haircut. Rivulets of sweat were running down my sides and somehow into my trousers.

Eventually, after 47 minutes, my hair looked exactly as it had six weeks before I had embarked on this journey. He showed me the back of my head again, in case I’d forgotten what it looked like, I suppose, and whipped off the apron. The sweat patches on my ill-considered T-shirt formed a map of the world. I paid him and left the shop poorer, but much better informed about the magnificence of the back of my head. Although I couldn’t tell you if I have a tapered or square neck.